In his wide-ranging collection of essays, Take My Name but Say It Slow, debut author Thomas Dai reflects on the role of place and movement in forming his identity. Dai’s Chinese parents came to Tennessee to pursue academic advancement and work, and he grew up in a McMansion outside of Knoxville. His Chinese first name is Nuocheng, a portmanteau of Knoxville (Nuokeshiweier, in Chinese) and Chengdu (his mother’s hometown in China). This name, which was tucked behind the Americanized Thomas for his public life in the U.S., set the stage for a lifetime of traveling.

Dai’s essay collection tells various stories of this life in motion: a yearlong trip to China following his undergraduate education in New England, the attainment of a Master in the Fine Arts degree in Arizona, a road trip around the United States following the path of Vladimir Nabokov. Dai’s fundamental question is one of identity. What does it mean to grow up queer and Chinese American in Tennessee? How was his Asianness interpreted by those around him, and how does he interpret it himself? Though he travels to China often and for expanding lengths of time, Dai has no easy answers. Instead, he offers glimpses of what it feels like to see his Asian identity refracted in spaces that don’t seem to have room for it—“a yellow tinted image on a white, white sheet,” as he puts it when describing Mark Twain’s depiction of Asian characters.

Nonetheless, he does find echoes of himself: in his grandparents’ apartment in Chengdu, where he obsessively records everything, including the sound of his grandmother’s midnight prayers; and in Arizona, where he reflects on Chinese immigrants who made their way to the U.S. through the southern border; and, finally, in the beautiful essay “Southings,” which reflects on how it felt to be Asian in 1990s Tennessee. Through writing, Dai has sought to make his private thoughts public, to focus on ever-shifting interiors. He achieves an intimate travelogue that spans time, distance and desire. The reader begins to see Dai become himself. They can, as Dai puts it in his title, say his name, but say it slowly, and see the multiplicity of Dai’s origins and his possible destinations.

“Candy is about happiness in the moment—this exact moment, each subdivided microsecond of melt, each deliriously destructive chomp,” writes Sarah Perry in Sweet Nothings: Confessions of a Candy Lover. Her wonderful, near-encyclopedic ode to confectionery sweets is a collection of microessays, organized by candy color and accompanied by line drawings, including everything from Pop Rocks and Pixy Stix to wax lips and Lindt truffles. It’s quite the contrast to her first book, After the Eclipse, about her 30-year-old mother’s murder by a stranger in their home when Perry was 12. “I was so tired of darkness,” Perry writes. “Maybe my next book, I told my friends, should be about kittens and rainbows. I didn’t know how accurate that joke would prove to be.”

A supremely serious connoisseur, Perry notes, “For some, it’s sports, yoga, gardening, or sex; for me it’s candy—and sex, though not at the same time.” Indeed, her writing can be sensual, as in her description of an Aero bar: “Hold a section in your mouth and feel it break down, chamber by chamber, your saliva flooding it like the compartments of the Titanic.” She’s often humorous, noting, for instance, her love of Vitafusion melatonin gummies: “I’m candy dependent even when unconscious.” Interesting history emerges as well, such as the fact that candy bars were first popularized “as a ‘nourishing lunch’ for hungry men and rations for exhausted soldiers in World War I.”

What’s perhaps most fun are Perry’s strong opinions. She calls cotton candy “an edible cloud, the purest possible form of sugar, a miracle of physics, and still, I hate it.” Of Necco wafers, she confesses, “I just cannot believe that anybody truly likes these. Like refined Tums.” And Junior Mints are “the most candy of the mints, total perfection all around.”

This is much more than a book about sweets, however. Perry uses the subject to delve into many aspects of pop culture, politics, emotion and her past and present life, including her polyamorous relationships. Throughout, she draws sharp, poignant connections between her musings about candy, and memories and loss of her mother: “There’s a satisfaction in learning the real meaning behind any childhood moment, even if that meaning is sad or scary. It takes these floating, isolated memories and pins them to the fabric of your life story, allowing you to better retain them within a greater context.”

Dip in and out of these essays as you would your favorite treat. Sweet but never saccharine, Sweet Nothings is a book worth savoring.